I discovered that standard controls couldn't achieve some of the visual effects I wanted. using @SW_SHOW and HIDE repeatedly caused flickers, transparent gifs have jaggy artifacts, and other methods had other problems. I discovered lod3n's PNG as GUI example, and proceeded to discover that it was a pain in the arse to create multi-image GUIs. I finally discovered that by using both Kip's _GuiCreate_Alpha and SetBitMap together, I could create child windows that could be used as the foundation fo